In London ‘Slaves’ Case, 3 Women Isolated Under a Maoist Guru’s Sway

A property was boarded up in South London, where Aravindan Balakrishnan and his wife, Chanda, were arrested after three women said they had been held against their will for 30 years.Credit
Facundo Arrizabalaga/European Pressphoto Agency

LONDON — They have become known as the “Brixton slaves,” three women who say they were held against their will for 30 years in a South London home.

When a man and his wife were arrested last week, some wondered briefly whether this was Britain’s Ariel Castro moment, recalling the man who imprisoned three women in his Cleveland home for a decade. Then speculation quickly turned to forced marriage and domestic slavery.

But the tale that has emerged is stranger still. It involves a Maoist guru who promised followers liberation by the Chinese Army, a cricket-playing Welshwoman who died after plunging out of a third-floor bathroom window, and parents trying to kidnap their own children.

Two of the women who called a charity hotline on Oct. 18 and left the home of the couple they identified as their captors a week later had actually met the couple in a far-left splinter group and moved into a “collective” with them in the 1970s. The two women have been identified in the British news media as Aisha Wahab, 69, from Malaysia, and Josephine Herivel, 57, from Northern Ireland, both from a middle-class background and college educated. The third woman, a 30-year-old Briton identified as Rosie Davies, appears to have been born into the collective and may never have gone to school, investigators said.

The picture of the three women’s lives that is gradually emerging from accounts by relatives of former collective members, neighbors, charity workers and the police is one of an isolated existence in a small sectlike group tightly controlled by a 5-foot-4 man named Aravindan Balakrishnan, now 73.

Mr. Balakrishnan — or Comrade Bala, as he was known — arrived in Britain from Singapore in the 1960s and ran a Maoist center on a street corner in the Brixton district of South London with his Tanzanian wife, Chanda. He was expelled from the leadership of a small Maoist group, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), for “splittist activities.” He reportedly mocked the group as the Communist Party of Elizabeth (Most-Loyal) and went on to found the even smaller Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, with about two dozen members who wore Mao lapel badges.

Mr. Balakrishnan had the charisma of a “guru,” said Steve Rayner, an Oxford professor who in 1979 wrote his Ph.D. thesis on leftist groups in Britain and studied the Workers’ Institute. “He clearly held a strong grip over the membership.”

Ms. Wahab, who had come to Britain with her Malaysian fiancé, was so smitten with Mr. Balakrishnan that she threw her engagement ring into the Thames, according to her sister Kamar Mautum, who was interviewed by The Daily Telegraph.

In 1978, after an attack on a police officer, the authorities raided the institute’s Mao Memorial Center and arrested 14 members, including Mr. Balakrishnan and his wife. The center subsequently closed, and the collective broke up, but a small group of people stayed with the couple, including Ms. Wahab and Ms. Herivel, investigators said.

So far, almost nothing is known about life inside half a dozen properties the group occupied over 30 years, all in southeast London. The police only this week started questioning the three women, who have been cared for by trauma experts in an unidentified location since October. But fragments of the experience of a fourth woman — another former collective member, who appears to be the mother of the youngest woman — offer a glimpse.

Photo

Hasnah Wahab, who lives in Malaysia, shows an old portrait of her sister Aisha, one of the women said to have been held.Credit
Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Sian Davies, an avid cricketer from rural Wales, moved into the collective while studying at the London School of Economics in the 1970s, according to her cousin Eleri Morgan. Ms. Davies died in 1997, seven months after falling out of the bathroom window on Dec. 24.

As soon as she joined Mr. Balakrishnan’s group, Ms. Davies cut off almost all contact with her family, said Ms. Morgan, a retired schoolteacher in London. The two grew up together, and Ms. Morgan often saw Ms. Davies after both moved to London in the mid-1970s.

“Almost from one day to the next, she vanished and her phone stopped working,” Ms. Morgan said in a telephone interview. The only time Ms. Davies visited her mother, one day in the late 1980s, she was accompanied by two group members. “They never left her alone with her mother,” Ms. Morgan said.

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Ms. Davies’s mother, desperate to track down her only daughter, at one point hired a private investigator. But the group, which relocated frequently, appeared to always be one step ahead. Ms. Davies’s boyfriend, Martin, also a member of the group, had been “snatched” and taken home by a man his parents had hired, Ms. Morgan said.

Even when Ms. Davies was hospitalized for seven months for spinal injuries after her fall, the group did not inform her family, Ms. Morgan said. “My auntie only found out after Sian had died and police came to tell her,” she said.

Ms. Morgan went to the hospital to identify her cousin’s body and picked up a small bag of belongings. News reports say that Ms. Davies died with only five pounds to her name, having transferred an inheritance to the group.

At a hearing, when a judicial inquiry into Ms. Davies’s death ended with an “open verdict” unable to determine its circumstances, Ms. Morgan came face to face with Mr. Balakrishnan. “I thought, what a weedy little man,” she said. “He was short, toothless — he had no upper teeth — and wore thick glasses that came down on his nose. I couldn’t understand how anyone could follow this man.”

But academics who study group dynamics say the Brixton collective may have represented a classic case of sectarian behavior.

“This reminds me quite a lot of the cases we are working on,” said Amanda van Eck, a researcher at the London School of Economics who studies small religious groups. “Especially in very small underground groups, you can have very coercive environments. If there is no website, no P.O. box, no connection with the outside world for a very long time, you tend to get some very problematic interpersonal relations.”

The police have said the women had “controlled freedom.” They were seen shopping at a nearby supermarket, and the youngest wrote love letters to a neighbor, The Guardian reported, albeit saying that she felt “trapped like a fly in a spider’s web.”

Slavery, Ms. van Eck said, “is probably not a helpful term here.”

“In the end,” she said, “they walked out of the door.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 30, 2013, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: In London ‘Slaves’ Case, 3 Women Isolated Under a Maoist Guru’s Sway. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe